The Failures and Successes of Saints Row: The Third

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By IGN Staff

For the first six months of its life, Saints Row: The Third was a very different game than the one we know now. The story followed an undercover cop infiltrating the 3rd Street Saints. Choice and consequence played a major role in where your character's allegiances lied. By the end of the first year, developer Volition scrapped this and restarted the entire premise, removed parkour from the combat, and killed the cover system. Why? Because it wasn't Saints Row, a series already struggling with identity crisis.

When design director Scott Phillips delivered the post-mortem for Saints Row at GDC 2012, his general lesson was "less is more," with a bit of "kill your darlings" on the side. His team learned a lot from last fall's open-world project, both in terms of righting the wrongs of the series' past, and figuring out how to design better games in the future.

Volition cribbed from film to prepare its big scenes.

To determine how something would look and play, the team used animatics to plan out what the biggest, best moments of the campaign would look like. Over years, whether through iteration or overcoming challenges, visualizations of The Third's "Holy Sh-- Moments" changed. In planning ahead like this, Volition figured out what wouldn't work before the game became bloated and irreparable.

Going into the latest Saints Row, Volition wanted to have fewer, better features. The second game in the series had too many scattered ideas and little cohesion, so Phillips focused only on doing more of what he knew would work. At the same time, Volition poured as many ideas as it could into conceptualizing The Third. Instead of "playing something until it felt fine" as it did the last time, the developer abandoned what sucked, and it did this often. "Every three to four months we would cut things," Phillips said. When all was said and done, Volition "ended up killing about 4000 man-days of scheduled work throughout the project.

Even after trimming consistently over three years, Phillips said "we ended up with too much stuff, we should have cut more." This was a consequence of having too few staffers to create the content. "We grabbed most of the programmers, a lot of the artists, and designers from other parts of the studio," Phillips explains. By the end of Saints Row: The Third's development, only 20% of its staff -- the largest of any THQ or Volition project -- had worked on the series beforehand.

It worked out. After three Saints Row games, Volition ultimately ended up proud of its work on Saints Row: The Third, because it found a proper tone and pace. This was the first Saints game where Volition bothered to consider what both meant to the player.

Everything in Saints Row 3 was then designed in the name of absurd fun. Phillips' most revealing philosophy is one that will likely dictate the future of the franchise: "Sometimes the shark is there to be jumped."